


Devil Woman

by retroco



Category: Stardew Valley (Video Game)
Genre: Dark, Demons, Eventual Smut, F/F, F/M, Fantasy, Gen, Horror, Multi, Mystery, New Age, Religious References, Romance, Supernatural - Freeform, Vampires, Violence, Werewolves, Witches
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-11-26
Updated: 2018-11-26
Packaged: 2019-08-30 00:10:49
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 874
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16754122
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/retroco/pseuds/retroco
Summary: Alice pursues her wayward hippie mother to the ends of the earth and follows her trail to Pelican Town where her findings end abruptly. Her last clues lie in an eerie tale told to her as a child referencing a remote, cursed land in which only the damned can survive.





	Devil Woman

Her earliest memory was of her mother’s voice in the moist, heavy dark of a summer night, a raspy whisper just above the rhythm of insects, the trills of animals calling to each other across the woods. A flashlight and a very old book out on the crumbling back porch. Tiny, dusty moths, stumbling across the yellowed pages, drunk on the light and the circle of sunburnt, raggedy children around her, slapping mosquitoes, perpetually in motion like puppies. No campfire that night. 

Alice remembered the moon, how huge it was, how she lay in her mother’s lap in her thin nightshirt (a faded hand-me-down) and played with her long, thin hair, the strands and strands of crystal beads she wore. She always told them the same story from the book, and Alice, the littlest of all the kids, would ball up her fists and screw up her eyes at the ending every single time, resisting the tears that came anyway.

The older ones had heard it so many times they could recite it perfectly, word-for-word, and would flicker their cheap yellow flashlights upwards on their faces as they repeated the scariest parts amongst themselves, shoving and laughing. A crowd of unbelieving disciples with bony wrists ringed with dingy friendship bracelets from friends they would not see again. 

A cursed valley of the twisted, the demonic, forgotten by man and condemned to walk the earth forever…. There is no leaving once you enter. 

Her mother had been gone for years, bones likely turned to dust in a land Alice could only imagine after simply vanishing from ‘camp’ on the very last day of the season. The kids dispersed their gang (what Alice had come to consider her family) after that shimmering summer and she never heard of them again, left almost alone in the big blue house with the woods out back and the rotting canvas teepees. 

Her father, the ever-faithful eccentric with his rooms of crystals and bones and relics of forgotten religions, stopped leaving his room entirely. She would bring him his meals, carry out the dishes. The smell of incense and other smoke more unknown to her wafted always from beneath the door with its tacky acrylic diamond knob. 

Her mother remained in the house as though she had never left, as though she was within every mote of dust that spun and danced in the thin light through the dirty windows. Her beads, rose quartz, plastic rainbow Mardi Gras, and hand-carved rosaries alike, looped over the arm of the black statue of the horned goat woman in the foyer, the faint scent of patchouli, sage and woodsmoke in the few clothes she had left behind. In the herbs she had dried that hung in the pantry, crumbling, and in the huge backyard garden, a once-magnificent refuge of flowers and herbs both common and rare that had been laid to waste by nature and the roving bands of cruel neighborhood kids. To save on food, Alice had tended a tiny corner, planted easy things like potatoes, carrots, tomatoes. Things she could coax from of the ground with the rusting hand tools in the shed. 

And in the evenings, she read all she could. Her mother’s saga of diaries, all the philosophical and religious texts she could decipher, highlighting every patch of scribbled notes carefully with a pink marker. Scouring the pages for evidence of where she had gone, then searching for puzzles, anagrams, any kind of clue, no matter how obscure. She had only one photo of them all together, the faces of the camp kids and her father crossed out in blue pen, only her blurry black-and-white mother unmarked, with a tiny Alice, bedecked in flowers, clutching her skirt at her knee.

One night, as she sat at the grand oak table with its grand, meticulously carved legs and thick glitter glue stains, she opened the unmarked fabric-bound book she had found much earlier in one of the drawers in the craft tent, a decrepit structure sitting slumped and morose in the rain in the backyard, growing mushrooms and mold.

There was a signature inside the cover, handwritten in purple ink, but she couldn’t make out the name. Not her mother’s writing. There was no publication information, no title. The book was entirely handwritten and illustrated, bearing black ink trees and little houses spiked into the paper by a somewhat clumsy hand with such force that the imprint showed through the other pages. Alice could barely make out the words. Her eyes blurred with tears as the realization made a lump as hard as a peach pit grow inside her throat and a cold void open in her chest. The illustrations seemed to grow more frantic as monstrous faces and twisted limbs rose from the page, the writing becoming sloppier and sloppier until the final page.  
It had a portrait of her mother in it, in the same purple ink as the signature, the pen strokes of the illustrator still brash but more careful. It was unmistakably her. The aquiline nose and wide slash of a mouth, open in a smile that took up her entire face and showed every single tooth. The beads. 

There is no leaving once you enter.

**Author's Note:**

> I started something new after like, two years. i'm only slapping up this intro for now to gauge interest.


End file.
